In his August 18th post, “Who and When Were the ‘Last Days Scoffers’?”, Gary DeMar calls two witnesses.1 The first is John Lightfoot, the seventeenth-century Hebraist, quoted from an assize sermon on James 5:9.2 The second is R. T. France, whose Tyndale commentary on Matthew is cited on the meaning of Matthew 26:64.3 Both quotations are accurate. Neither witness says what the post needs him to say, and in both cases the material that would have corrected the impression sits a page or two away from the words that were lifted.

To be clear: I am not accusing DeMar of inventing quotations. The words are on the page. The problem is appropriation, and the test is whether the author would have signed the paragraph his words were placed into. Anyone who has spent time in hyper-preterist material knows the pattern, because it is not peculiar to one writer. A respected name is produced, a paragraph is quoted in which that man reads some prophetic text of the fall of Jerusalem, and the quotation ends at exactly the point where he would have gone on to affirm the thing the citation is being used to deny. John Owen is the standard case. His exposition of 2 Peter 3 is quoted constantly for its reading of the heavens and earth as the Judaic church and state, while his commitment to a future bodily return and a last judgment is passed over. Spurgeon gets the same treatment on Matthew 24, and now Lightfoot on James 5:9.

Lightfoot

The sermon DeMar quotes was preached at the Ely Assize on September 12, 1671, on the text “Behold, the Judge standeth before the door” (James 5:9). Lightfoot is preaching to a court that is about to sit. His method throughout is to take the earthly tribunal in front of him and turn it into a meditation on the tribunal to come. He asks his hearers what sort of heart a man carries who can watch an assize and never think of the great day of judgment, and he grounds the appeal in 2 Corinthians 5:10.

Early in the sermon Lightfoot raises a question about his text. He asks what the apostle’s “immediate, and most intent, and direct sense” is in these words, and he observes that several New Testament expressions of this kind seem to point at the nearness of Jerusalem’s destruction. He lists 1 Corinthians 10:11, 1 Peter 4:7, and Hebrews 10:37. The paragraph about the last days follows here, and it is the paragraph DeMar reproduces: “By the last days are meant the last days of Jerusalem, and of that nation.”

But then he says this: “If we should take the words in this sense, and pointing at such a time and matter, I suppose, it might not be far from the apostle’s meaning. But do his words reach no farther? Are not these things written for our learning, as well as for theirs, to whom he wrote?” And his answer: “Dispute it not; but rather, down on our knees, and bless and magnify the patience and goodness of this Judge, for that he is standing at the door, and hath not yet broke in upon us.”

Hath not yet broke in upon us. Lightfoot preached that in 1671, sixteen centuries after James wrote, and he preached it as the plain meaning of the door standing shut. The AD 70 reading is something he grants as a possible reference of the phrase. The application he actually makes is that the Judge has not yet entered, and that the interval is mercy.

The rest of the sermon confirms this at every point. Lightfoot tells his hearers exactly which judgment he intends to preach on, and he rules the other one out of bounds: “Eternal judgment is one of the first principles of Christian religion;—viz. the judgment that doth determine of every man’s state for eternity; for, of God’s temporal judgments, we shall not speak here. And that judgment is either particular, passed upon every one at death; or general, which shall be at the last day.” A temporal judgment on a nation is the one category he sets aside. What he treats instead is the particular judgment that meets each soul at death and the “great Judge’s judging all the world at the last day.” For the second he goes to Revelation 20:11-12, where the dead “that were not in being, are brought into being, that they may be brought to judgment.” That is bodily resurrection followed by a universal assize, and Lightfoot places it in the future.

He also quotes 2 Peter 3:12 as an outstanding expectation, calling it a hard saying because a man must be prepared to hasten the day when the heavens will be dissolved. If Lightfoot had believed that the day of God in 2 Peter 3 arrived under Titus, he would not have spent a paragraph on how difficult it is to long for it.

The most damaging paragraph for the post is the one about the mockers. Lightfoot pairs Amos 6:3, on those who put the evil day far away, with Isaiah 5:19, on those who taunt God to hurry his work along so they can see it, and then identifies them: “Directly these mockers, 2 Pet. 3:4, that say in scorn, ‘Where is the promise of his coming?’” He is preaching that to Englishmen in 1671 as a live indictment of men sitting in front of him. DeMar cites Lightfoot to establish that the scoffers of 2 Peter 3 were a closed first-century group whose complaint was answered when the temple fell. Lightfoot treats them as a standing type and warns his own audience that they may be it.

Finally, Lightfoot anticipates the imminence argument itself and refuses it. He notices that Paul writes about the resurrection as though he might live to see it, quotes 1 Corinthians 15:51 and 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, and then says plainly that “so many hundreds of years above a thousand are passed since his time.” His resolution is not that the language was fulfilled in AD 70. It is this: “I have learned always to think, that ‘the Judge always stands before the door.’ And I would teach all generations and ages to believe the same.”

DeMar does note, to his credit, that Lightfoot’s admonition is not limited to his own generation and that the Judge still stands before the door today. That concession is correct, and it is fatal to the argument it appears inside. If the door language remains live now, then expecting the Judge is not scoffing. It is the response the text asks for. A post cannot cite Lightfoot to keep the door open and then charge the men standing at it with mockery.

France

The France citation raises a different problem. DeMar quotes his comment on Matthew 26:64, where France argues that the language of coming on the clouds alludes to Daniel 7:13 and describes vindication and enthronement rather than a descent to earth, and that the phrase translated “hereafter” should be read as marking something beginning immediately. That is genuinely France’s position, and the quotation is fair. Orthodox preterists have every reason to welcome it.

What the post does not tell the reader is what France says about the parousia in the pages immediately preceding. His outline of the discourse divides it into judgment on Jerusalem in 24:1-35, the judgment associated with the parousia in 24:36-51, two parables of judgment in 25:1-30, and the final judgment in 25:31-46. He argues that the aim of chapter 24 is to suppress excitement about the parousia rather than to encourage it, and he says that such an aim would sit very strangely alongside a claim that the parousia had to happen within that generation. He rejects the reading of “the close of the age” as the end of the Jewish era, on the grounds that apocalyptic usage points to a final conclusion and that Matthew has already used the phrase that way in chapter 13. He treats Matthew 24:36 as a deliberate change of subject, and he says the destruction of the temple and the parousia are “quite deliberately presented as historically distinct.”

Two further comments deserve attention. On 24:27, France argues that Jesus mentions the parousia precisely to rule it out of the events of the Jewish War, since it will be of an entirely different character, as unmistakable as lightning. On 24:43-44 he expresses astonishment that Christians still try to calculate a date for the parousia. And on 24:3 he notes that the word appears in the Gospels only in this chapter, while the Epistles use it repeatedly for Christ’s return in glory.

That last observation bears directly on the post’s closing argument. DeMar asks what coming the mockers of 2 Peter 3 were denying and answers that it is the one Jesus declared in Matthew 26:64, and he concludes that the answer to the mockers is that Jesus did come and the temple was destroyed. But the noun in 2 Peter 3:4 is παρουσία. The witness DeMar has called says that this word in the Epistles refers to the return in glory, and that in Matthew 24 it is used to distinguish that return from the events surrounding Jerusalem’s fall. France’s exegesis of 26:64 was borrowed. His exegesis of the term at the center of the passage under discussion was not.

There is also an internal tension worth naming. If France is right that the vindication of Matthew 26:64 begins immediately and became visible to the men who condemned Jesus within weeks, then the scoffers of 2 Peter 3 could have been answered without waiting for the temple to fall. If instead the coming of 26:64 is an event dated to the summer of AD 70, then the reading DeMar borrowed from France has been quietly set aside. The post takes the enthronement reading for its polemical value and the AD 70 event for its evidential value, and it does not reconcile the two.

Coming and returning are not the same word

While I’m at it, there is one other issue I want to raise. Notice that DeMar uses “coming” and “return” interchangeably throughout the post. He frames the disputed claim as Jesus “physically returning,” he says Jesus aligned his coming with the generation that would not pass away until he returned, and he describes the mockers as denying that Jesus would return before their generation passed away. Within a few paragraphs all of that language refers to AD 70. A word that means descent in the opening sentence has been moved onto an event with no descent in it, and the move is never defended.

The two words describe different motions. Daniel 7:13 has the Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days, which is motion toward the throne. That is why the vindication reading of Matthew 26:64 works at all, and why France says the Danielic allusion in 24:30 refers to coming to God rather than coming to earth. Παρουσία works the other way. It means presence or arrival, and it was the ordinary term for the official visit of a king or governor to a city. It fits a descent and does not fit an ascent to receive authority. The New Testament keeps the two apart. The mockers of 2 Peter 3:4 ask about the promise of his παρουσία. The angels at the ascension say he will come in the same manner, ὃν τρόπον, as the disciples saw him go (Acts 1:11). Hebrews says he will appear a second time, ἐκ δευτέρου, to save those who are waiting for him (Heb. 9:28).

Neither witness uses “return” for AD 70. France uses the word twice, both times for the parousia, and both times while he is distinguishing the parousia from the Jewish War. He notes that the Epistles use παρουσία repeatedly for Christ’s return in glory, and he says that Jesus’ return, unlike his first coming, will be no secret affair that anyone could miss, which sets up the lightning of verse 27 and keeps the parousia out of the war. When he describes AD 70 in verses 29 through 31 he moves the opposite way and says the Danielic language is not a coming to earth. He also points out that Matthew does not use παρουσία in that passage.

Lightfoot never uses “return” in the sermon. He does use descent language, and he applies it to what has not happened yet. When he raises the imminence problem in Paul, the text he quotes is 1 Thessalonians 4:16, “The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout.” He then observes that more than a thousand years have passed since Paul wrote, and he says he would teach every generation to expect the Judge at the door. The one place in the sermon where Christ descends is the place Lightfoot puts in the future.

The equivocation is doing work the sources will not do. The post needs the coming of Matthew 26:64 to be non-spatial vindication when it answers the charge that Jesus failed to show up, and it needs the same coming to be a return when it charges present-day expectation with mockery. Those are two different events in the vocabulary of the New Testament, and both of the witnesses DeMar has called keep them separate.

What this asks of us

I hold that a number of passages were fulfilled in AD 70. Within the Olivet Discourse I locate that material in Matthew 24:15-28, where the desolating sacrilege, the order to flee Judea, and the tribulation of those days describe the war and the fall of the city. The temple came down within the generation Jesus named, and that judgment vindicated him against the men who condemned him. There are some things that I would agree with Gary on.

I do not follow Lightfoot and France everywhere either. Lightfoot presses the AD 70 reference into texts where I would not go. France carries it through verse 35, and I do not, which means my disagreement with him is sharper at that point than DeMar’s is. Neither man is a confessional authority, and neither needs to be defended at every turn. That is precisely why the citations matter. When you call a witness you do not get to keep the sentence you like and suppress the one that follows it, and the more freely you disagree with a man elsewhere, the less excuse you have for representing him badly here.

DeMar is not a beginner who stumbled into a bad footnote. He has been publishing on eschatology for four decades and runs an organization built on it. He gave a page number for France, which means he had the volume open, and the material that dismantles his use of it is in the same volume on the same discourse. He quoted two consecutive portions of Lightfoot’s sermon and stopped at the sentence where Lightfoot turns and says the Judge has not yet broken in. Lightfoot then applied the mockers of 2 Peter 3:4 to men sitting in front of him in 1671, and said he would teach every generation to expect the Judge at the door. France read the cloud language as enthronement and then insisted, in plain terms, that the parousia is a separate event whose date no one can calculate. Both men are here enlisted for the claim that expecting a future coming is the error of the mockers. Neither one held it, and both of them said so in the works being cited.

I will not speculate about intent, and I do not need to. The effect is what matters, and the effect is that readers who trust Gary DeMar have been handed two respected names as support for a position those names reject. Most of them will never open the sixth volume of Lightfoot’s Whole Works to check. That is the whole leverage of a citation, and it is why misusing one is not a small thing. Those who have watched DeMar handle other primary sources will find the method familiar. The fix is simple and available: publish the rest of what Lightfoot and France actually said, and let the argument stand or fall in front of the same readers who saw the first version.

I came across a piece on Substack from Darren Doane arguing that the entire New Testament should be read in light of AD 70, including 1 Corinthians. Doane is a good friend of Gary DeMar and appears to have gone the full preterist route.

One text he comments on is 1 Corinthians 7. Paul writes, “I think that in view of the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is” (7:26). “Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife” (7:27). “The appointed time has grown very short” (7:29). “The present form of this world is passing away” (7:31). Doane’s reading is that Paul is not disparaging marriage but, in his own words, is “pastoring in a storm.” With revolt brewing in Judea and Rome on the move, he says, the late sixties would bring hunger, displacement, and seized property, so telling young believers to think hard about vows and households was sound pastoral counsel.

It does not work.

I say that as someone who used to say the same thing. Back in 2002 I ran this very experiment, taking the whole New Testament and running it through AD 70, and I would have written these paragraphs myself. What strikes me now is how oblivious I was to problems that surface the moment you slow down and ask whether the reading actually fits the text in front of you.

Doane is correct that there is a section of Matthew 24 dealing with the abomination of desolation and a flight from Judea that concerns the first century. Jesus was giving evacuation orders for a specific population, not general advice for a distant doomsday. “Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains” (Matthew 24:16), and Luke ties it directly to seeing Jerusalem surrounded by armies. I do not grant that all of Matthew 24 refers to AD 70, but that portion does.

Which is exactly why Corinth cannot be brought under it. The warning names a place, and Corinth is not that place. It sits roughly seven hundred miles from Jerusalem, across the Aegean, in the province of Achaia, a Roman colony the Jewish War never touched.

And notice that the command itself rules out the wider reading. Flight only makes sense if there is somewhere safer to go. If the danger spilled out beyond Judea so that believers in Achaia had to restructure their households around it, then telling Judeans to run for the mountains was pointless counsel. Run where? The whole force of “flee” depends on the trouble being local and the outside being safe.

And Paul tells us plainly what the Corinthians were doing with their money. “On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up” (1 Corinthians 16:2), to be carried “to Jerusalem” (16:3). Romans 15:26 names Achaia, Corinth’s own province, among those who gave. They were not selling off assets to stay mobile. They were saving, week after week, and sending it into the one city Doane says was about to be the worst place on earth to keep anything.